The End of the World as We Know It

By Allen Holub

April 1, 2006 —

REDMOND, April 1, 2006—Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) announced today that it will retire its Windows operating system in early 2007.

“I just bought one of the new Apple MacBook Pro notebooks,” said Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, “and it’s a great machine. I was impressed by the quality of the UI and the stability of the platform—much better than anything we’ve ever done.

“I just had a Windows device driver fail the other day and lock up my Windows XP Professional laptop,” Gates continued. “Nothing like that seems to happen on my new Apple machine under Mac OS X 10.4. I even have a Unix command line when I need to do real work.”

“Now that the Mac is Intel-based,” added Gates, “it’s a trivial matter to run legacy Windows applications on the Mac using a virtual-machine-style product. So, of course we’ll buy VMware and shut it down,” he said. “But in the long term, why even bother making an inferior product like Windows? We’ll just port everything to the Mac.”

Gates went on to say, “When I looked at what was involved in the porting process, I was shocked to learn that our developers were using proprietary dialects like C# and Visual Basic. These programs can’t run on any operating system except Windows! What were my developers thinking? We tell our customers to use this junk, of course, otherwise they might be tempted to go with that open-source stuff, or with another platform, but I never thought for a minute that we’d use it ourselves! We don’t want to be locked in to a single operating environment. Consequently, I’ve ordered a complete rewrite of all our server and desktop products in Java. That way they’ll run on my new machine without difficulty.”

Gates pointed out that the rewrite should not be difficult since Microsoft’s code was strictly object-oriented. “We’ve been pushing bad programming practice on our customers for years,” he said, “so that they won’t be able to compete with us. Our published libraries, such as MFC and .NET, aren’t the least bit object-oriented, and Visual Basic is such a kluge that I’m amazed that anyone fell for it! Since our programmers take OO design seriously, their work will be much easier to modify than if they had been using that junk we promote publicly.”

When asked about the time involved in getting the new Java versions of Office, SQL Server, Exchange, BizTalk and other essential applications to market, Gates said it would be minimal. “We have a complete use case analysis, problem statements and UML models for all our products. Since we’ve spent so much time on this up-front analysis, the implementation should go seven or eight times faster than anything our competition can do. Even when you factor in the design time, we’ll still get to market two or three times faster than will anybody who doesn’t do this stuff—and that’s most of the industry.”

Gates chuckled. “Clowns. How can they imagine that they’ll get anything done jumping right in to coding without any up-front work? They’re like chickens running around with their heads cut off—in a constant state of panic that stops them from thinking clearly. Our competitors will have to toss out their implementations at least a dozen times before they get it right, or release a buggy product and get slammed by the reviewers. They’re even using loosely typed languages like PHP! That alone should cost them six months of development!

“Not only that,” Gates bragged. “We’ve developed a set of lightweight processes that work for us, and we follow them in a disciplined way.”

He shook his head. “It amazes me that even though we’ve known how to develop quality software in minimum time for years, nobody seems to be doing it! People just make all the same mistakes over and over again as if all this stuff was a dark secret. Think how many start-ups have failed just because they were in too much of a panic to spend a few weeks thinking about what they were doing before they did it. It’s a waste, a terrible waste.”

Software ports are expensive, and when asked about whether outsourcing would make sense, Steven Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, said, “We do plan to outsource almost all of our core business in the future. In fact, I have a major round of layoffs planned for Christmas Eve. Outsourcing could indeed work here, given the quality of the up-front design and the fact that these products are well-known quantities without anything innovative going on.”

Ballmer did indicate one extra benefit of outsourcing. “There are bound to be issues that come up once we get code into the real beta testers’ hands. They’ll have lots of useful suggestions, and incorporating these suggestions will make for a better product. That’s something we know that all our customers have been waiting for.”

Allen Holub is an architect, consultant and instructor in C/C++, Java and OO Design. Reach him at www.holub.com.

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